With two delivery models in the Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services (CITEIS) program, Cisco IT is meeting the needs of developers who just want raw servers and storage and those who want a fully managed platform service. The two models are an ongoing subscription service for a virtual data center (VDC) and a customizable set of resources for short-term use.

Pack your bags, double up on shoes and leave room for swag, it’s time for VMworld 2013, and Team Cisco Data Center has a lot going on. For a full round up of our show presence, this: http://www.cisco.com/go/vmworld

Yes, that is a tower of real bacon at #vBacon.

Now for the the behind the scenes look. First, follow @CiscoDC and #ciscovmw for all Cisco-flavored information from the show. This year’s Roving Reporter duties will be most ably handled by Scott Hanson (@CiscoServerGeek). Follow Scott for up to the minute geek’s-eye views on what’s happening.

We are also welcoming Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk), one of five Cisco vExperts, who will be leading a talk through our #vBrownBag sponsorship. Details pending–we’ll update you as we have the specifics.

Cisco and NetApp continue to drive innovation with new FlexPod offerings that enable organizations to address their business needs while reducing risk and increasing IT efficiency and agility. FlexPod combines the Cisco Unified Computing System, Cisco Nexus data center switches, and NetApp storage components and provides a powerful platform for critical application workloads.

Please join us on Wednesday, August 7, 11 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, when we will kick-off a technical series detailing FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud. In this live webinar, presented by Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and NetApp, you hear from technical experts on the following topics: Read More »

Recently I spent time at Cisco Live Orlando where I caught up with Trey Layton, CTO, VCE. We had an opportunity to talk about automation and orchestration of Vblock with Cisco UCS Director (formerly Cloupia). Over recent months, we have been doing even more work for our customers, collectively between our companies, to do deeper integration and to simplify the management, administration, provisioning and automation of our converged infrastructures.

As we see the continued trend to move to a services model in IT and adopt a private cloud infrastructure, Cisco UCS Director is the only solution to provide single pane of glass automation and provisioning of all virtual and physical assets and can provide end-to-end orchestration across server, network and storage resources. With Vblock, it provides our mutual customers an elastic pool of resources to be able to consume and adapt to various applications and use cases that customers are deploying in the virtualized or bare metal environments.

We are excited about the developments around both what UCS Director and Vblock are delivering, and there is a lot more in the works moving forward to continue to support simplification and agility for our customers’ data center architecture.

The next release of UCS Director will add VMAX and VNXE storage support to the product by September. This will allow UCS Director to support all Vblock models with complete server, network and storage provisioning automation.

The UCS Director task library will include over 50 Vblock specific tasks to allow users to easily build model-based automation workflows to dynamically provision the system.

As organizations accelerate private and public cloud deployments, IT organizations and data center networks must evolve to meet rapidly changing and growing requirements. Virtualized and cloud environments require more agility and simplicity to quickly deploy and migrate virtual machines. IT organizations, on the other hand, are challenged with operational complexity, architectural rigidity and infrastructure inefficiency with manual processes, disjointed provisioning, deficient software overlays, static resource allocations and disruptions when growth is needed.

The good news is that Cisco continues to evolve its Unified Fabric to address these needs. The new Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation delivers unsurpassed operational simplicities through superior integration. It does this by …. Read More »

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